For Green Week this week, Purdue Dining & Catering put on a week of education on locally-sourced foods! Each of the dining courts had one lunch day specifically sponsoring locally-sourced foods, and we decided to check out the various events.
Throughout the week, the dining courts featured foods like Spinach Beet Salad, Potatoes au Gratin, Glazed Sweet Potatoes, Fresh Apple Cider, Marion Blackberries and Butternut Apple Soup, just to name a few of the foods put together from our local suppliers. The dining courts also featured tables of local apple slices, Â different kinds including Honeycrisp, Gala, and Red and Golden Delicious.
Darcy, an Executive Chef at Ford, shared one of the recipes being used this week with us!
Purdue has a long history of sustainability, and today the Green Week events are only a very small part of Purdue’s sustainability initiatives. These initiatives include things as small as signs telling the community to turn off lights in rooms they are leaving, to bigger things like Purdue’s bike share program, to very sophisticated mechanisms like using food waste from Dining Courts to power the water cleaning plant.
Another piece of Green Week was the Sea to Fork initiative. This initiative focused on connecting fishermen with chefs, buying fish from small-scale, sustainable, wild fisheries and overnight shipping them straight to Purdue restaurants. The main inclusion of this seafood for the week was The Gathering Place on Thursday night, which featured Parmesan “Charred” Tilapia Provencal and Indiana Bacon and Corn Chowder. At the Sagamore Restaurant, they also joined in on this arrangement with local fisheries. They are featured fish from one of the oldest fishing ports in America, which is actually the setting for Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.
Did you go to any of the Harvest Party Events this week? Let us know what you thought!
Thanks for checking in!
Sarah & Amanda
Purdue Dining & Culinary 